Advertising support

Historically, the newspaper, radio, and television industries are able to realize revenue and offer information services to the public at a low cost because they are able to find sponsors who pay them to advertise products. The World Wide Web has embraced this business model; most Web sites include some form of advertising. Web sites that provide information services fund their operations through the sale of advertising, and companies and e-commerce sites can also market their own brands through strategic ad placement.

Windows Media Services provides support for advertising in a variety of ways:

• Playlists. Playlists provide an easy way to provide interstitial advertisements during a broadcast. Dynamic playlists can respond to a client's user profile to target advertisements demographically.
• Wrappers. Wrappers can be used to provide a set of advertisements at the beginning and end of the client's requested content. Wrappers are often used to implement bumper advertisements or lead-in/lead-out ads.
• Reporting. Detailed log files and real-time performance counters provide a means of monitoring the activity of your Web site and evaluating your audience. Counters that reflect the number of clickthroughs, the number of plays, and the length of time the client viewed the advertisement are available for you to use in billing and reporting.

Related topics

• Displaying banner ads
• Displaying interstitial ads
• New features in Windows Media Services
• Supporting personalized on-demand content
• Working with wrapper ads